Mar 30
Establishing a road between settlement (diplomacy)
Since we now have settlements and their influence circle for properties and laws, I think we should have ways to establish trades between settlements.
Eco is a cooperative game about creating societies, via research, trade and agreements, so we need some kind of diplomacy apart from annexation.
Something I find tedious on some servers is road building, and it make sense to be able to have a game mechanic for establishing a road between two settlements and have it protected, even in distant lands.
I imagine with the embassy desk being able to craft/draft a road project with another settlement, the leader of which could validate and they agree on the position (use construction posts maybe on each chunk, or a tool like to draw districts) and costs share for the contract.
Then until the agreement is revoked by one of the settlement or one settlement becomes invalid, the road blocks and few blocks of air above are protected by the agreement (so no one can grief the road, but you can mine under if you want, or claim a chunk on the way).
Closed
It is already possible to create protected roads via district and law mechanics - when settlements agree on a road, they can simply zone districts for them and create laws for their protection in their respective jurisdictions. Protection of roads outside of the jurisdiction of a settlement is not possible from a technical standpoint and doesn't follow the design idea of jurisdictions. The protection would need to cease functioning once some other settlement has influence over parts of a road made this way to respect their natural jurisdiction and there would be issues to determine which settlement has jurisdiction at any points where multiple roads from different settlements would cross. Determining protections is only supported via laws in Eco, as such it would be highly complex to determine degree and exemptions of protections for a mechanic that doesn't use the law system as well. The intended way to protect long distance roads is through founding countries and federations for increased influence. As such this suggestion is closed for unfortunately going beyond the scope of Eco.